As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
One type of information handling system is a server, which is a processor-based network device that manages network resources. As examples, a file server is dedicated to storing files, a print server manages one or more printers, a network server manages network traffic, and a database server processes database queries. A Web server services Internet World Wide Web pages.
A server may be implemented as a “stand alone” or monolithic servers in which a single chassis contains a single set of processing resources and an associated set of I/O resources. A multiprocessor monolithic server may, for example, include two or more processors that share access to a common system memory and a common set of peripheral devices including persistent storage resources, network interface resources, graphical display resources, and so forth. In other implementations, some of the I/O resources available to the server are provided as external components. Persistent storage, for example, may be provided to a monolithic server as an external box.
In more recent years, servers have been implemented as “blade servers.” Blade servers are so named because they employ server blades, which are thin, modular electronic circuit boards containing one or more microprocessors, memory, and other server hardware and firmware. Blade servers, which are sometimes referred to as a high-density servers, typically include a space saving, rack-based chassis that accepts multiple server blades. Blade servers are often used in clusters of servers dedicated to a single task. For example, a blade server may function as a web server by servicing web-based requests addressed to one or more universal resource locators (URLs). In this implementation, the blade server may route individual requests to different server blades within the blade server based on factors including the current loading of individual blades and the locality of information required to respond to a request, all in a manner that is transparent to the user.
Power management and power conservation is an increasingly important consideration in the design and implementation of all information handling systems in general and server system especially. Power consumption is not only costly, but it also generates heat that must be dissipated to maintain performance parameters as well as the electrical and mechanical integrity of the server. Traditional thermal management efforts have tended to focus on techniques for performance “throttling” by, for example, slowing the speed of the system clock, reducing the number of instructions processed per unit of time interval, reducing the operating voltages, and so forth. While traditional thermal management techniques have utility, they tend to have a negative performance impact that is generally undesirable.